Veterans Day Tribute: The only legacy my father ever sought

Last May, I posted this tribute to my father, Clyde Gunnels, a veteran of World War II who died in 1989. It seems fitting to post it here on the day before Veterans Day.

May 25, 2013

Dad was 24 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He was a farm boy who picked cotton and worked on cars while he waited for his life to begin. He had just met a girl he liked, a 17-year-old from a nearby farm who still was nursing a broken heart from a failed marriage to a soldier a few months earlier.

Then the world changed. Within a few months, my father was in the U.S. Army, training in California for the invasion of North Africa and carrying a photo of the young girl – my mother – in his uniform pocket.

Instead of the desert warfare he was trained to fight, Dad and his unit – the 7th Infantry Division – were sent to the Pacific. There, he participated both in the first (Aleutians) and last (Okinawa) invasions of Japanese-held islands. He waded ashore four times, each time in the first waves, and never received a scratch.

My father hated the Japanese with a fierceness that never faded – until the day a family moved next door to us 20 years after the war. He was a serviceman who met and married his wife while serving in Japan. As a child, she had huddled in makeshift bomb shelters while B-29s rained fire and destruction on Tokyo. Hearing her stories, my father’s war-forged prejudices weakened and finally collapsed. “Well,” he said one night, “I guess people are just people.”

When the war ended, Dad came home, married my mom, began his family and worked for more than 40 years as an automobile mechanic. His only recreation was to piddle around in his yard, to wash and wax his string of excellently maintained used cars and to sneak an occasional swig of whiskey from the bottle he hid from my mother in the garage.

At 71, he waged a courageous fight against lung cancer and died the day before the 4th of July. He rarely talked about the war, a trait he shared with many of the young men who fought in that desperate struggle and saved the world from a terrible tyranny. The ones who had the most to talk about were the ones who had the least to say.

Most of them are gone today. We are their legacy, the only one they ever sought.